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$1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

sciencemag.org

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Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#181

Post by bladegash »

otoburb wrote: post #69
SeasonalEnnui wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple-decades of hearing aid wearing here. I agree with most of that. I ended up buying the programmer for my aids to do small tweaks (not the prescription/audiogram, just the program configuration where you can edit the level of DSP in various situations). I would say that this latest generation of hearing aids (Phonak Marvel) is the first generation where I've felt like they've got it right. Direct bluetooth con…

And the Phonak Marvel's retail price is north of $1,000 USD. Can some of the cost to the individual be defrayed through medical insurance in the US?

Some medical insurance plans provide coverage. I previously had a plan that covered the cost up to a certain amount per hearing aid, but only like once every couple of years. So if you were like me, and only needed one hearing aid, they would cover $800 for one ear or $1,600 for two. But I couldn’t, say, get one for $1,600.

Now I have a plan with a different employer that doesn’t cover them at all.

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#182

Post by panabee »

emcq wrote: post #103
Someone wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple already sells a hearing aid that they can’t legally call ‘hearing aid’. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209082 : “With Live Listen, your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch can act like a microphone that sends sound to your AirPods or Powerbeats Pro. Live Listen can help you hear a conversation in a noisy area or even hear someone speaking across the room.” It even supports hearing aids (a few? Some? Many? The most p…

Unfortunately live listen is more like a replacement for remote microphones, not the hearing aids themselves. It adds around 70ms latency with a bluetooth headset. This is enough to be very uncomfortable. For comparison, most hearing aids on the market today have around 8ms of end to end latency. Source: I've built a hearing aid and done extensive latency tests :)

thanks for sharing! what’s considered the lower bound for comfortable latency?

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#183

Post by whjohnson37 »

wefarrell wrote: post #72
rini17 wrote: post #7

Hearing aids (nor cochlear implants, for that matter) do not "restore hearing", except for light hearing loss. They are only like crutches (not even wheelchair). For example, to follow conversations or phone/skype with multiple people is very exhausting even with fancy device, because in most cases the "bandwidth" to the brain just isn't available. That said, the hearing aids vendor lock-in is really atrocious and ca…

Cochlear implants do not "restore hearing" but they do allow people who are completely deaf to sense sound well enough to understand speech. That's a huge change in a deaf person's life.

Cochlear implant user here - they completely changed the arc of my life. I lost my hearing when I was 12 and was deaf for 15 years, so I do have some sense of what normal hearing is like. Sound quality is pretty good in the speech-level frequencies but degrades when you move away from that range (music sounds worse than I remember). That being said, I score in the 90%+ percentile for speech recognition and am able to talk on the phone with no problems.

There's no telling where I would be without my cochlear implants, but they truly have provided me a second chance at life. I got married, went to a great graduate program, and have a high paying, fulfilling job - all products of being able to communicate effectively.

Communication underpins fulfillment and self-worth. Any product that helps those in need communicate better is a net positive.

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#184

Post by KTallguy »

I've been using over-the-ear hearing aids for about 8 years and they have become a part of my life, like contact lenses. The technology has improved dramatically but it's simply not fun having something riding on your ear. They need adjustment throughout the day, and now that facemasks are a thing they're always getting snagged. And there are just some situations where they aren't ideal: many people talking at once in different parts of a room, or when there is any kind of heavy background noise (fire alarms, sirens, etc.).

That's why the neural implant that Musk recently demonstrated excites me to no end. Everything is inside the body, no need to amplify or filter anything, just interface directly with the nerves and compensate for the damage. I hope I don't have to wait more than ten years to get one.

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#185

Post by gugagore »

jbarham wrote: post #165
rini17 wrote: post #7

Hearing aids (nor cochlear implants, for that matter) do not "restore hearing", except for light hearing loss. They are only like crutches (not even wheelchair). For example, to follow conversations or phone/skype with multiple people is very exhausting even with fancy device, because in most cases the "bandwidth" to the brain just isn't available. That said, the hearing aids vendor lock-in is really atrocious and ca…

> Hearing aids (nor cochlear implants, for that matter) do not "restore hearing", except for light hearing loss This claim is totally false for cochlear implants. I am a cochlear implant recipient and before the implant I had essentially no hearing in my right ear ("profoundly deaf"). With the implant in my right ear my hearing has been restored to 90%+ of normal hearing.

What does 90% mean, and out of curiosity can you distinguish two notes one semitone apart on e.g. a piano?

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#186

Post by vel0city »

TheRealSteel wrote: post #128
Someone wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A recent smartphone has enough hardware for that, I would think, and if it hasn’t, but the idea made sense, it would be added. If the hardware can power a GPU and a million-pixel display, it can power quite a beefy DSP, too. I would worry about the latency of a round-trip over Bluetooth. Google search tells me it’s, optimistically, 100ms single-trip, so 200ms round trip ( https://www.headphonesty.com/2020/07/fix-soun…

Can anyone who knows about Bluetooth comment on why I can ping google in 50ms (wirelessly, even), but a Bluetooth round trip over a few centimetres takes 2 - 3X that?

As callalex mentioned, the spread spectrum could introduce some delays into something like first packet response but this isn't necessarily the crux of the issue. Once a channel is being used, it can often stick around on that particular channel for a while so subsequent packets wouldn't necessarily have to do the whole spread spectrum dance until the devices start experiencing issues. IIRC there's some amount of stickiness to the spread spectrum utilization, but I could be wrong.

You're a tad bit incorrect on Bluetooth round trip a few centimers being 150+ms. Plenty of game controllers operate on or on top of Bluetooth and do not have 150ms latency. Headset Profile (HSP) bluetooth also does not (usually) have 150ms+ latency, usually more along the lines of maybe 30ms latency while many Bluetooth controllers will have https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/8wvf9u/contro...

I'm not the person who designs codecs, but I'd wager most of the lag seen with Bluetooth audio systems come from the codecs. Bluetooth devices are often incredibly power constrained, so codecs operating over Bluetooth are usually trying to balance quality with computational complexity and dealing with packetization of the audio. When you're listening to an audio stream, it appears like a continuous stream of data. In reality, its chunks of data. You're listening to a previous chunk of data while the device is waiting to get the next packet, apply error correction to it, decode the very highly compressed data, and have the waveform ready to go out to your ears all on usually pretty cheap and highly power constrained equipment. It then has to be a bit tolerant to the above mentioned spread spectrum and a potential dropped packet here and there while still seeming to just be a continuous audio stream.

So in short, there's latency in a lot of Bluetooth audio codecs because the designers of the codecs felt the latency tradeoff was acceptable given the bandwidth, compute, power, and quality envelopes based on technology available at the time of crafting the codec.

Meanwhile, you're sending out pings on a device with keys on the keyboard bigger than the battery on a lot of bluetooth headsets with many orders of magnitude more processing power whose wireless connection is not normally that much of a power concern encoding/decoding extremely basic data to one of the companies with the most privately owned fiber with billions of dollars of computing equipment.

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#187

Post by AMC11 »

danjc wrote: post #113

I get that this product is about super low cost but seems to me that with a custom firmware, the AirPods Pro could do a brilliant job of noise cancellation and amplification of specific frequency bands. Ostensibly, you could even employ some ML to enhance clarity of spoken words, etc - like Krisp

You might be interested in this other comment chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24580446

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#188

Post by jbarham »

gugagore wrote: post #185
jbarham wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hearing aids (nor cochlear implants, for that matter) do not "restore hearing", except for light hearing loss This claim is totally false for cochlear implants. I am a cochlear implant recipient and before the implant I had essentially no hearing in my right ear ("profoundly deaf"). With the implant in my right ear my hearing has been restored to 90%+ of normal hearing.

What does 90% mean, and out of curiosity can you distinguish two notes one semitone apart on e.g. a piano?

After my cochlear implant operation I volunteered to participate in an in-depth research study to collect data on post-op outcomes for cochlear implant recipients (coincidentally at the Eye & Ear hospital in Melbourne where the multi-channel cochlear implant was invented and first implanted in 1978 by Graeme Clark).

I did a whole raft of audiology tests and for the speech comprehension tests in particular I scored 90%+ compared to people with normal hearing. (They're tough tests too, trying to pick out a sentence from a lot of background noise which is a worst-case scenario for hard of hearing people.)

I was told that my outcome was better than average, but I was a younger than average adult recipient given than I was in my early 40's, compared to most (in Australia at least) who are 60+.

And yes I can now distinguish all notes on a piano.

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#189

Post by stjohnswarts »

bagacrap wrote: post #93
sputr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn that link made me happy. Was wondering if anyone has done to hearing aids what they did for glasses. We just brought my father progressive glasses for 100usd (would be 400+usd here at a 'normal' store). Now he needs a hearing aid and we're dreading the multi-hundred payment on top of what is covered with insurance for a basic device. So.. What's the catch with these cheap hearing aids? Why would we not buy these…

quality? doesn't this question apply to every cheap Chinese product? My mom has had poor hearing for decades and always spent thousands on her hearing aids for marginal improvements in quality (e.g. noise cancelling, size, noticeability). The only thing that really made a big improvement was when she finally got a cochlear implant.

Just like anything else you can by "cheap" or you can pay more and get a better product 99% of the time. I find chinese tools and electronics are just fine if you aren't going bargain basement.

Re: $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

#190

Post by gugagore »

jbarham wrote: post #188
gugagore wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does 90% mean, and out of curiosity can you distinguish two notes one semitone apart on e.g. a piano?

After my cochlear implant operation I volunteered to participate in an in-depth research study to collect data on post-op outcomes for cochlear implant recipients (coincidentally at the Eye & Ear hospital in Melbourne where the multi-channel cochlear implant was invented and first implanted in 1978 by Graeme Clark). I did a whole raft of audiology tests and for the speech comprehension tests in particular I scored 90…

Thanks for sharing. This is getting into territory that non-musically trained hearing people would probably have difficultly, but can you distinguish between a C major chord and a C minor chord? And do you have any other feelings about it, like one sounding sad or happy?

I don't think any of this is particularly relevant to understanding spoken language, but I'm just curious about your outcome.

I'd be surprised if a majority of current CI users could distinguish e.g. middle C from C# (not identify the note, but just perceive a difference between them), but I don't know that many CI users.

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